root Archives : FATMIN

This is a neat and very useful trick that I learned today. Lets say that you want to be able to monitor and log all keystrokes that are typed as root. This is particularly useful as normally you can only log when a user uses sudo to run a command. If the user has the abilty to become root however, then they have effectively eluded yourattempts to track their activity. Like Thomas Magnum shaking a tail, they are free to scoot around your island with the top down.

So how do you stop this from occuring? How to you log all activity and keystrokes made by root without implementing a bloated 3rd party software that will probably cost and arm and a leg? You use PAM you dingbat.

The secret sauce in this security burrito is the pam_tty_audit.so module. Here is how to use it,

Below is my stock /etc/pam.d/system-auth file

#%PAM-1.0
# This file is auto-generated.
# User changes will be destroyed the next time authconfig is run.
auth        required      pam_env.so
auth        sufficient    pam_fprintd.so
auth        sufficient    pam_unix.so nullok try_first_pass
auth        requisite     pam_succeed_if.so uid >= 500 quiet
auth        required      pam_deny.so

account     required      pam_unix.so
account     sufficient    pam_localuser.so
account     sufficient    pam_succeed_if.so uid < 500 quiet
account     required      pam_permit.so

password    requisite     pam_cracklib.so try_first_pass retry=3 type=
password    sufficient    pam_unix.so md5 shadow nullok try_first_pass use_authtok
password    required      pam_deny.so

session     optional      pam_keyinit.so revoke
session     required      pam_limits.so
session     [success=1 default=ignore] pam_succeed_if.so service in crond quiet use_uid
session     required      pam_unix.so

Now look above and then look below at my modified system-auth file. Note the additonal session entry for pam_tty_audit.so.

[root@ip-172-31-21-28 pam.d]# cat system-auth
#%PAM-1.0
# This file is auto-generated.
# User changes will be destroyed the next time authconfig is run.
auth        required      pam_env.so
auth        sufficient    pam_fprintd.so
auth        sufficient    pam_unix.so nullok try_first_pass
auth        requisite     pam_succeed_if.so uid >= 500 quiet
auth        required      pam_deny.so

account     required      pam_unix.so
account     sufficient    pam_localuser.so
account     sufficient    pam_succeed_if.so uid < 500 quiet
account     required      pam_permit.so

password    requisite     pam_cracklib.so try_first_pass retry=3 type=
password    sufficient    pam_unix.so md5 shadow nullok try_first_pass use_authtok
password    required      pam_deny.so

session     optional      pam_keyinit.so revoke
session     required      pam_tty_audit.so enable=root
session     required      pam_limits.so
session     [success=1 default=ignore] pam_succeed_if.so service in crond quiet use_uid
session     required      pam_unix.so

Note that you will need to add the pam_tty_audit.so call to your /etc/pam.d/password-auth as well to ensure that you capture all of root's keystrokes, no matter how they log in.

Much Todo About Linux/RHEL Passwords

RHEL6 – How to Manually Logout of an Iscsi Disk

Fun With PAM: Working with pam_cracklib and pam_tally2

Hello again earthlings. The fatmin returns once again to dispense a bit of wisdom. This handy one-liner is a command that for the life of me I cannot remember.

Our story begings when building your kickstart config and post-install config files you are going to need to set the password for at least one user (being root). If you are like me your configs add all sorts of users. As you know you cannot just stick the password for these users into your config files in plain text, rather you need to encrypt them via ssl.

The command to do so is below.

openssl passwd -1

At this point you will be prompted to enter the users password — twice. Then the command will spit out your ssl encrypted password which you can then shove into your config files.